


The I-Don't-Fucking-Know-Some-Number-Who-Gives-A-Shit Days of Christmas

by stackcats



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2013-12-12
Packaged: 2018-01-04 10:31:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stackcats/pseuds/stackcats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malcolm and Jamie celebrate their first Christmas together as a legit couple. There's a snowman and a fir tree and Christmas cards and it's all so horribly normal that Malcolm might vomit up his internal organs, except that it's Jamie's favourite time of the year so he's determined not to spoil it, even if he doesn't intend to actually enjoy it. Set post-series 4 (and as a sequel to Varying Definitions of Normal).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The I-Don't-Fucking-Know-Some-Number-Who-Gives-A-Shit Days of Christmas

The paperchain is red and gold and green and silver, and it stretches all the way around the living room twice. Jamie hasn’t been so proud of any of the festive shit he’s made since the night before last, when Malcolm got up at 2 a.m. buzzing with insomnia, to find Jamie gone and a heavy snowfall outside the window. He’d searched the house, started to panic, and eventually found Jamie at the corner of the street putting the final touches to a hermaphrodite snowman with admittedly finely-sculpted tits and over-sized tennis ball testicles. Malcolm had studied it for a moment, went back inside, and returned with a frozen Cumberland sausage for the final touch. They’d left her/him there wearing nothing but a scarf, leaning jauntily against the postbox, and when Malcolm got up the next morning to de-ice the front step, someone had already given their snow(wo)man a lacy black bra, a hat, and a pipe. This morning the hat was gone, but someone had drawn on a lipstick mouth and there were complaints in the local paper, mostly from grandparents of small children.

 

The paperchain is a lot less creative, really, being simple links of brightly coloured, glossy paper, but Jamie’s excited about it and apparently that’s all that fucking matters at this farcical time of year. The house is still full of boxes containing things like Malcolm’s toaster, to which he is inexplicably attached, and clothes, and books, and _stuff_ , but all of Jamie’s domestic energy (which had previously appeared to be severely limited but has now turned out to be boundless) is being channelled into Christmas decorations. There’s already a tree, a _real_ fir tree, propped up in the corner waiting to be decorated while it quietly sheds prickles all over the carpet, which Malcolm now regrets insisting on having laid before moving in. He’s not put the hoover away in three days. Jamie’s waiting for the weekend to decorate it because he doesn’t intend to do it alone, and Malcolm has refused to go near it.

 

There are cards, too. Lots of cards – hundreds, in fact, to Malcolm’s never-ending surprise, and they still keep turning up in the letterbox each day. He’s torn between feeling oddly warm and strangely fuzzy, and wanting to know exactly how all these fuckfaces know where they live. Red and gold festive scenes, robins, Santas, snowmen, elves, reindeers, and snowscapes, all bearing handwritten messages from people they know, or once knew, or members of the public who’ve decided Malcolm is some sort of celebrity (probably the same mad people who wrote to him in prison), and Jamie has taken each one and carefully blu-tacked them to the walls of the living room and kitchen. In pride of place on the mantelpiece are the cards from Sam ( _Merry Christmas, I miss you both_ ), the small, carefully-chosen card with a tasteful nativity scene from Jamie’s mum addressed solely to Malcolm ( _welcome to the family xxxx_ ), the huge card from Malcolm’s sister, Megan, which sings when you open it and which he has firmly sellotaped shut, and the hand-drawn Crayola-and-fingerpaint monstrosities from Jamie’s hoard of tiny nieces, nephews, varying degrees of cousins, and several godchildren. (Last night, while Jamie was snoring on the couch, Malcolm sat for an hour and stared at Jamie’s card arrangement, and then got up very quietly and re-arranged a few things. There’s now a card from Nicola Murray amongst the friends-and-relatives, a privilege bestowed upon her in honour of her new career.)

 

Jamie’s already taken the liberty of writing out and sending their own Christmas cards, for which Malcolm is both deeply annoyed and extremely grateful. On the one hand, how _dare_ Jamie assume to sign Malcolm’s name to anything, even so much as a socially obligatory token of seasonal acknowledgement, while on the other hand Malcolm had absolutely no intention of becoming involved in that tedious process either. Sam had always done his Christmas cards in the past, and that’s sort-of the point – Jamie isn’t an employee any more. When he writes “from Malcolm  & Jamie”, it’s not referring to them as a _team_. In the old days, anything signed off by both of them held more weight than a court-order. Press officers would scramble to obey whatever instructions the memo bore, in fear of threats of sexual violence, actual dismemberment, and severe personal and professional humiliation, potentially in that order. This is ink-and-cardboard proof of what they’ve evolved to become; equals, partners, a _couple_ , achingly normal, almost conventional – as Jamie’s pointed out, they’re far from the most interesting couple on the cul-de-sac (the old biddy at number twelve with the twenty-year-old toyboy wins that award, in Malcolm’s opinion). They’re not the rowdiest couple either – Jamie had agreed to an armistice on last week’s fight over his new job so they could eavesdrop instead on Ted and Maureen next door screaming at each other over who forgot to feed the fish, which had been far more entertaining than trying to get Jamie to believe he’s too good to be anyone’s fucking _sub_ -editor (an argument Malcolm has decided to put off until the new year). They’re not even the only gay couple, as it turns out – he caught the bloke from number eight eyeing Jamie up in the corner shop about a week after they moved in. Gabby the shopgirl rung up their milk and newspapers and Jamie’s three packets of fags, and told them that Patrick and Harry have lived round here for years, which is good because it means they’re more complacent about security, and Malcolm’s done a recce, and if either of them dares to look at Jamie again Malcolm knows exactly how he’ll get into their bedroom and smother them both in the middle of the night.

 

Malcolm’s self-aware enough that he _knows_ his irritation over the Christmas cards is all about the strangeness of being part of an entity called _Malcolm and Jamie_. It’s worked fine so far in their self-contained bubble of mutual obsession since Malcolm’s release from prison. They’ve managed to find, agree on, and purchase a house, after all, in addition to co-ordinating a couple of renovations they both decided were necessary (loft into spare bedroom; bathroom extension to accommodate the enormous bath Malcolm’s decided he’ll need in his approaching old age; new conservatory; and the lawn’s become a patio because fucked if Malcolm’s going to operate a mower and he doesn’t trust Jamie with appliances). Furniture was easy because Jamie couldn’t summon a fuck to give about interior design if you tortured him, and Malcolm has simple tastes. Day-to-day life is easy too, since they eat the same things, hate the same TV programmes, and are capable of removing themselves from the same room as each other if they start to piss one another off – and if that doesn’t work, a simple fucking _argument_ isn’t going to come between them after everything else that’s tried and failed.

 

But now the entity _Malcolm and Jamie_ is faced with a new collective decision, and Malcolm’s a bit out of his depth on this one. He’s never actually had to decide what he’s going to be doing on Christmas day before. Being the one day off he ever had each year, he used to spend the 25 th December sleeping, eating, and sleeping some more. Sam would usually come around with a Christmas pudding, and if Jamie was in town he’d appear around 6 p.m. with a bottle of cheap Scotch, demand a blowjob, and get kicked back out on the street. Once or twice, back in the early 90s, his mum and Megan had come down for Christmas, but then Megan married and had children and he was invited to her home every year but was never able to take more than just that one day off. His own marriage lasted less than a year and either side of that he spent Christmas alone. His relationship with Kelly just barely spanned three Christmases, and she’d been good enough to give him the option of coming with her to spend the day with her hideous university friends or staying at home alone. One year he’d opted to stay home and invite Jamie round, but the little gobshite was already, at two in the afternoon, so drunk that even Malcolm’s best oral efforts had left them both frustrated – or, at least, Malcolm frustrated and Jamie obliviously dozing on the couch. Last year he spent Christmas in prison, where they didn’t give you any choices (sort-of the whole point of being there, apparently), though you could trade your one mince pie for a couple of cigarettes or a snack-size Twix if you spoke to the right bloke out by the aviaries.  

 

This year, as he blue-tacks one end of the paperchain to the corner of the ceiling, Jamie presents Malcolm with _options_.

 

“What do you want tae do, Malc?” he asks. “Y’know, on the day itself.”

 

Malcolm looks up from the paper and summons strength from his depleting reserves of tolerance – _once a year_ , he tells himself, _once a year_. “Ideal day?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Get up at noon, eat food, go back to sleep.”

 

“Yeah, but-“

 

“Maybe you could manage a blowjob that doesn’t involve teeth. Then more sleeping.”

 

Jamie frowns in concentration as he begins the laborious process of stringing the paperchain across the room. He has to climb up on the coffee table, the mantelpiece, and the back of the sofa in order to stick loops to the ceiling, and Malcolm feels he is making a very great concession in not objecting to this Pythonesque indoor mountaineering. He’d worried about this, briefly, when he had time between worrying about everything else – it no longer makes him turn pink around the edges to admit that he loves Jamie, that he’s going to grow old with this man and annoy him by pretending to be deaf, and get him to run around and do things for him by pretending to have arthritis, and a hundred other ways he’s come up with to mess with Jamie in the coming years. It’s just that, when he considered, as a younger man, the possibility of spending the rest of his life with someone, he hadn’t envisaged that it’d be the sort of person he has to occasionally remind that showering every day is compulsory, yes even on Saturdays, and no, changing your underwear is not an acceptable substitute, wait, hang on, don’t you change your fucking underwear every fucking day, you revolting little cunt?

 

Jamie seems to have worked on that, since they’ve lived together. He now does laundry of his own volition. Malcolm’s seen him buy nail clippers, though he hasn’t caught him actually using them yet, and his fingernails are as chewed-up as ever. Still, it’s progress on the only front which Malcolm has deemed non-negotiable. What isn’t going away any time soon is Jamie’s approach to material objects, which is a very simple and straightforward approach, and consists of one principal; the only real, tangible, thing in this house that means anything to Jamie whatsoever is Malcolm. They could probably agree that the roof and walls are essential, but he has no appreciation for stuff, and he’s stuck in a strange childhood-poverty mindset that they have money now so everything they own is somehow disposable and easily replaced, as evidenced by the Nespresso machine that flew out of the window when it wouldn’t bow to Jamie’s random button-pushing whims. Philosophically, it’s something of a double-standard, but so is almost everything Jamie does and Malcolm has no intention to change him insofar as he can stand to sleep beside the grubby little gutter-rat. He has started choosing cheaper kitchen appliances, though, and banning Jamie from touching anything he hasn’t read the manual for.

 

A tentative domestic harmony is maintained by simple acts such as Malcolm carefully moving his coffee cup aside when Jamie hops up onto the table. He also holds the trail of paper loops to one side so Jamie doesn’t get wrapped up in them and fall off again.

 

“You probably,” Jamie suggests, “want to go to your mum’s, yeah?”

 

“Christmas eve,” says Malcolm, trying to go back to reading the paper. Christmas is on a Wednesday. He always goes to see his mum on a Tuesday. Jamie gives him a narrow-eyed glare. “What?”

 

“You’re a monster and you’ll die alone.”

 

“No I won’t, I’ll die with you in a fiery explosion next time you try and work the oven.”

 

“Oi, I read the fucking book, okay? Anyway, won’t Megs be there?”

 

“Megan. Yeah. And the kids.”

 

“So…?”

 

Malcolm shrugs, finally and properly annoyed. “Do we really have to decide this now? It’s weeks away.”

 

“Well, no, but-“ from Jamie’s vantage point on the table, something catches his eye outside the window and he tilts his head for a better look. Malcolm gets up and pushes the net curtain aside to see a large dog running down the street with a sausage in its mouth.

 

“Ach, poor Ingrid,” says Jamie, sadly.

 

Malcolm throws the paper down on the sofa. “I’m going for a bath. Come and knock around the tenth of January and make sure I haven’t fucking drowned, okay?”


End file.
